The arc of history is long and trending hotter, but at the moment it is hard to claim it bends towards justice. This symposium engages widely shared anxieties and aspirations regarding the role of the humanities in the midst of crisis. The challenge of integrating climate change and environmental justice into teaching is only partly a matter of disciplinary expertise. Georgetown University climate historian Dagomar Degroot will discuss his successes and failures in teaching about climate change. The symposium concludes by grappling with dystopian visions in order to ask how humans live with climate change and how critical pedagogies can avoid exacerbating a “climate of despair.”

Moderated by Perrin Selcer (University of Michigan), facilitated by Anne Berg (University of Michigan).

Dagomar Degroot is an assistant professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His recent work focuses on the resilience of different societies to pre-industrial climate change; the history of animal cultures in the Arctic, and the social impacts, on Earth, of environmental changes in outer space. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. His second book, Civilization and the Cosmos: An Environmental History of Humanity's Place in the Solar System, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Penguin Random House. He is the co-founder of the Climate History Network, an organization of more than 200 climate scholars, and the founder of HistoricalClimatology.com, a website that receives roughly 500,000 hits per year.

This event is part of the Friday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg. Presented with support from Environmental History Interest Group; Institute for the Humanities; Program in the Environment; and Science, Technology, and Society.